Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jules Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright born on the 8th of February 1828 and died on the 24th of March 1905. He is best known for the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, and Around the World in Eighty Days.
Jules Verne was born on the 8th of February 1828 on Île Feydeau, a small artificial island on the river Loire within the town of Nantes. He was born in the house of his maternal grandmother, Dame Sophie Marie Adélaïde Julienne Allotte de La Fuÿe.
In the Anglosphere Verne was often labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because his novels appeared in highly abridged and altered translations. British and American publishers marketed his books almost exclusively to young audiences, and early translations were criticized for omissions, errors, and alterations.
Verne met Pierre-Jules Hetzel in 1862 through their mutual acquaintance Alfred de Bréhat. Hetzel accepted his manuscript, which became Five Weeks in a Balloon, published on the 31st of January 1863, and signed Verne to a contract for three volumes of text per year.
Jules Verne died on the 24th of March 1905 at his home in Amiens at 44 Boulevard Longueville, now Boulevard Jules-Verne. He was ill with chronic diabetes and complications from a stroke that paralyzed his right side.
Verne has sometimes been called the father of science fiction, a title also given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback, because of his influence on the genre's development. Verne himself denied writing scientific or prophetic work, saying I have invented nothing and that he wrote Five Weeks in a Balloon as a story about Africa.
Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. In the 2010s he was the most translated French author in the world.